Plenty of facts, truth, and good stories: New non-fiction releases for your to-read list
By Nicole Abadee
It’s not only big novels that drive the crucial publishing season over the next two months. Non-fiction forms an equally important part – for readers, publishers and bookshops. Here is a selection of what’s on offer in September and October. There’ll be more in November.
Australian
Gina Chick, granddaughter of Charmian Clift, has written her memoir.Credit:
In We Are the Stars (Simon & Schuster, October 2), writer and adventurer Gina Chick, inaugural winner of Alone Australia and granddaughter of celebrated writer Charmian Clift, writes about her unconventional life, from being a daredevil, book-loving child bullied at school to an adult faced with almost unendurable tragedy. Chick writes with courage, vulnerability and authenticity.
In A Periodic Table (ABC Books, out) Dr Karl Kruszelnicki recounts how he became a famous TV and radio presenter after multiple careers including as a car mechanic, a physicist, a roadie and a paediatrician. He owes it all, he says, to insatiable curiosity. His writing (like him) is quirky, self-deprecating and entertaining.
Internationally best-selling novelist Markus Zusak (The Book Thief) turns to memoir in Three Wild Dogs (Picador, out), a description of his family’s tumultuous life with three large rescue dogs. Filled with the hilarious (and at-times terrifying) antics of the dogs, and told with Zusak’s customary warmth, wit and compassion, this is a love letter not only to dogs, but also to the omnishambles of family life.
Markus Zusak with Archer (left) and Reuben.
Professor Richard Scolyer, 2024 Australian of the Year and leading melanoma pathologist, was in 2023 diagnosed with terminal brain cancer. Brainstorm (Allen & Unwin, October 29) written with Sydney Morning Herald writer Garry Maddox) is the story of life before that diagnosis and since, when he and colleague Professor Georgina Long have implemented a radical treatment plan that has so far kept him tumour-free. Scolyer holds nothing back in this brave, compelling account of a life turned upside-down.
Virginia Trioli.Credit: Luis Enrique Ascui
Journalist and writer Virginia Trioli’s A Bit on the Side (Macmillan, September 24) reflects her zest for life and passion for fine food, combining descriptions of significant culinary moments with the recipes that accompanied them, and celebrating the joys of a life filled with travel, food and good times shared with friends and her blended family.
There are some excellent history books out, too. Paris in Ruins (Text, out) by Pulitzer-Prize-winning Sebastian Smee, art critic for The Washington Post, explores the connection between the Prussian occupation of France and siege of Paris in 1870-71 and the birth of the Impressionist movement shortly after, with focus on Edouard Manet, Berthe Morisot, and Edgar Degas. It’s a vibrant portrayal of the relationship between political and art history.
The Yirrkala bark petition, presented in 1963.Credit: Yirrkala artists
Stella Prize-winning historian Professor Clare Wright’s Naku Dharuk (Text, October 1) is a ground-breaking history of the 1963 Yirrkala Bark Petitions, which were sent by the Yolngu people to Parliament to protest the mining of their traditional lands, launching the modern land rights movement. It is the third in Wright’s deeply researched democracy trilogy, following The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka and You Daughters of Freedom.
Historian and writer Yves Rees tells a cracking, never-before-told tale in Travelling to Tomorrow (NewSouth, out) of 10 trailblazing Australian women who ventured to the US in the early 20th century, among them a lawyer, an interior decorator, a swimmer and an economist. Together, these women helped to forge a stronger relationship between the two countries and imported innovative ideas such as synchronised swimming into Australia.
Finally, the irrepressible Tim Minchin has written his first non-fiction book. You Don’t Have to Have a Dream (Penguin, out) is a compilation of three speeches made over the past decade. Included are Minchin’s nine rules for life, advice on a career in the arts and life as an actor. It’s straight-shooting, wise and funny.
Look out as well for memoirs from Jimmy Barnes and Noni Hazlehurst, journalist and writer Rick Morton’s Mean Streak (HarperCollins, October 16), about the robodebt debacle, and Shapeshifting (UQP, October 1), a collection of innovative First Nations creative non-fiction co-edited by Jeanine Leane and Ellen van Neerven.
International
Egyptian-born writer Andre Aciman, who lives in Manhattan, is best known for his internationally bestselling novel Call Me by Your Name. His memoir, My Roman Year (Faber, out), describes the year he (then a teenager), his brother and their deaf-mute mother spent in Rome in 1966 after being forced to leave their home in Alexandria. A yearning, emotive description of what it is to be a migrant.
Gillian Anderson has curated a collection of women’s fantasies.Credit: AP
Ever wondered about women’s innermost sexual fantasies? Look no further than multi-award-winning actor Gillian Anderson’s Want (Bloomsbury, out). Her publishers invited women from around the world to send anonymous letters about their most intimate desires. Anderson curated a selection of their responses. It’s illuminating.
Craig Brown is a contributor to the satirical Private Eye magazine and author of the hilarious bestselling Ma’am Darling about the late Princess Margaret. His latest, A Voyage Around the Queen (HarperCollins, out), an idiosyncratic biography of the late Queen Elizabeth II, is equally entertaining – filled with snippets of interesting information about her and the disarming impact she had on those who met her (called “the royal effect”).
Character Limit (Cornerstone, September 18) by New York Times tech reporters Kate Conger and Ryan Mac reveals the full story of Elon Musk’s $US44 billion takeover of Twitter and the fallout as he changed the company’s name (to X) and its character – from a “digital town square” to something more sinister. Meticulously researched, it includes revealing interviews with company insiders.
Why did Elon Musk trash Twitter? Kate Conger and Ryan Mac try to answer the question.Credit: Bloomberg
Leading British historian William Dalrymple (also cohost of popular podcast Empire) writes in The Golden Road (his term; Bloomsbury, out) of India’s cultural and intellectual pre-eminence between 250BC and AD1200, a period during which it spread its ideas about religion, mathematics, art technology far and wide to create an “Indosphere” that transformed the world.
Ben Macintyre’s latest thrilling narrative non-fiction (others include The Spy and the Traitor and Agent Sonya) has all the drama, suspense and intrigue we’ve come to expect from the British writer and journalist. The Siege (Viking, September 17) tells the story for the first time of the six-day siege of the Iranian embassy in London in 1980 (there were 26 hostages), which culminated in the storming of the embassy by the SAS.
Stanley Tucci tells us all about the food he ate in one year.
British farmer and writer James Rebanks, author of the bestselling The Shepherd’s Life, writes in The Place of Tides (Allen Lane, October 22) about the quiet but meaningful existence of an old woman living on a remote Norwegian island where she gathers the down of eider ducks.
The Rest is History Returns (Bloomsbury, October 1) is a follow-up by popular historians and podcasters Dominic Sandbrook and Tom Holland to The Rest is History. Here, they take an irreverent look at how some of history’s defining moments might have played out differently – for example, the response of King George III to the United States’ Declaration of Independence.
What I Ate in One Year (Fig Tree, October 15) by Italian-American actor and globetrotting gourmand Stanley Tucci is a foodie memoir filled with reminiscences of meals eaten in the course of a year around the world – alone or shared, in restaurants, hotels, on film sets and in his own kitchen. These accounts are accompanied by warm, engaging writing about Tucci’s life as an actor, husband, father and friend.
Look out also for new books from Hillary Clinton, Something Lost, Something Gained (Simon & Schuster, September 18), and veteran journalist Bob Woodward, War (Simon & Schuster, October 15).
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